Ted Serong

Francis Philip "Ted" Serong (11 November 1915-1 October 2002) was a Brigadier of the Australian Army who fought in World War II and the Vietnam War and shaped the army's counter-insurgency doctrine.

Biography
Francis Philip Serong was born in Abbotsford, Victoria, Australia in 1915, the son of a Madeiran Portuguese immigrant. His strong anti-communism led him to join the Australian Army in 1934, and he served in training and staff roles during World War II, seeing combat against the Japanese at Wewak late in the war. After the war, he retrained the Australian Army and headed the jungle training center at Canungra in 1955, developing the army's counter-insurgency doctrine. He served as a jungle warfare advisor in Burma during the late 1950s and served as a strategic advisor to the Tatmadaw from 1960 to 1962, when he was appointed to command the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam (AATTV). From 1965 to 1968, he was the senior advisor to the South Vietnamese Police Field Force, and he left the army in 1968 and remained in Vietnam as a security and intelligence officer to the South Vietnamese. He continued to serve in Vietnam until the Fall of Saigon in 1975, and he would later become a controversial figure due to his support of right-wing causes and militias. He died in 2002 at the age of 86.